


after the fade

by lorspolairepeluche



Series: all these earthly acts and more [3]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Arguing, F/M, Post-Here Lies the Abyss, nearly losing halla fucks cullen up, the fade fucks halla up, theyre both bad at the emotions thing so they fight about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-25
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 05:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8652352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorspolairepeluche/pseuds/lorspolairepeluche
Summary: To be alone with your fear is a terrible thing, whether in the Fade or the physical world.





	

“Alright, you have your way in.”

Halla turned, still panting, to see Cullen hurrying to them. “Best make use of it,” he advised. “We’ll keep the main host of demons occupied for as long as we can.”

“That’s a worrying lack of specificity there, Commander,” Aiyan observed.

“There are more of them than I was hoping, Inquisitor,” Cullen answered grimly.

“You don’t say,” Panna muttered.

“Warden Stroud and Warden-Commander Aeducan will guard your backs,” Cullen told them. “The Hawkes are with our soldiers on the battlements; they’re assisting them until you arrive.” He looked up at a shriek to see a demon toss an Inquisition soldier from the battlements. “There’s too much resistance on the walls!” he said through gritted teeth. “Our men on the ladders can’t get a foothold! If you can clear out the enemies on the battlements, we’ll cover your advance.” He turned to go back to his soldiers, but—

“Cullen, wait!” Halla grabbed his arm and pulled him back, kissing him once, swiftly, before putting her forehead against his. “I’ll see you after,” she told him.

Cullen allowed himself the moment of tenderness. “You promise?”

“I promise.”

“We have to go,” Nadarr Aeducan said shortly. “We need to find Clarel and talk some sense into her.”

“I know.” Halla stepped back, but she kept her hand touching Cullen’s until their outstretched fingers slipped from each other and she turned to lead the charge.

Halla found herself running next to the Warden-Commander. “It’s an honor to fight with you!” she shouted over the noise of the fighting.

“Honor’s mine, Inquisitor,” Aeducan replied.

“Do your best to survive!” She shot him a grim smile. “I don’t like the idea of telling Morrigan you didn’t make it.”

Nadarr chuckled, unsheathing his sword from his back as they approached the steps to the battlements. “I’ll wager no one does. My Morrigan can be scary as hell when she wants to. Oh, and the same order to you: don’t die.” His sword undercut a Warden, sending them hurtling from the steps as he shouted, “I don’t think that Commander of yours would be able to handle hearing you didn’t survive.”

Fifteen minutes later, Cullen watched the side of Adamant crumble, and Halla’s name dropped from his lips on a terrified breath.

—

Cullen saw the Fade open and close once more, and the next time he saw the Inquisitors, they were short two people. His initial glance over them had his heart stopping for a moment— _where’s Halla?_

But then there she was, her head bowed, her arm around Aiyan’s waist, half-carrying him. Cullen nearly called out her name, but the sound died in his throat as she looked up, looked around—looked for him?

No, her eyes landed on Solas, who carefully took Lavellan from her and started healing him. Halla stumbled, and Dorian tugged her back upright, keeping an arm tight around her shoulders and saying something that makes her give him a halfhearted smile. He didn’t seem to believe the expression, and he hugged Halla for several seconds. She hugged back after a moment, seeming to wilt in his grasp until her cousin was nearly holding her up.

Cullen tore his eyes away. He had looked long enough; Dorian would take care of her as Cullen did his duty and commanded the last vestiges of the siege. There would be time to speak to Halla later.

What would he say to her right then, anyway? He still didn’t know what had happened on top of the fortress, save what he’d seen. Corypheus’s dragon had attacked the battlements and fallen off the side, taking a chunk of the fortress with it, and when the Inquisitors returned, Aeducan and Stroud were gone.

But a cry had him turning mid-order, and he watched in fear as Dorian set Halla gently on the ground, her face twisting in pain and her hands clutching at her abdomen. Dorian was already scolding her as he set to work, and Cullen shook his head, turning back to the lieutenant and finishing his instructions. He allowed himself one last glance back as the lieutenant hurried away. Dorian had managed to coax a weak smile from Halla as he distracted her with his usual quick wit and they waited for Solas to finish with Aiyan.

Cullen turned away. Right now, he was the Commander and she the Inquisitor. Right now, he couldn’t let himself worry over her.

There would be time for that later.

—

She could have gone ahead. Halla could have traveled faster, with just her companions, and gotten back to Skyhold long before the army.

But she didn’t. She stayed with the troops, marched with them, helped tend the wounded. Cullen saw her every few hours, comforting a dying soldier or walking in the midst of a battalion. She was never close enough to speak to, but his heart warmed every time he caught a glimpse of her. _She’s still here. She’s still alive._ But there was still that thorn within the happiness.

He’d read the reports before sending them on to Skyhold. Saraan’s and Panna’s had been clearest; they’d explained in plain detail how, when Halla heard Stroud yell from the edge of the crumbling bridge, she had run back for him, shoved him back onto the bridge—and shoved herself off the edge as a result.

Every time he imagined it, imagined watching her fall off the edge like that (and, oh, his mind loved to taunt him with an image of her most frightened expression when he did), his stomach dropped faster than she could possibly have. And still it got worse.

Even Halla had freely admitted: _As we fell, I took a risk. I opened a rift, and we fell into the Fade._ She had chosen the Fade rather than the fall, and even after that, she’d gone even further: _When Warden Stroud and Serahs Hawke all offered to stay in the Fade and fight the demon to buy us time, I offered a third option: I would stay, open the Fade for them, shut it behind them, and deal with the demon myself. If I killed it, I would have then opened a rift momentarily and escaped._

But she had left out only one thing: she certainly hadn’t announced this plan to the others.

_Halla started charging at the demon,_ Panna wrote, _shouting back that she would meet us outside. I can only assume she meant out of the Fade. Luckily, she never got the chance. Both Hawkes and Stroud reacted quickly. Selby grabbed Halla as Stroud ran past them to fight the demon. Leith and Saraan and I cleared the way, and Selby and Aiyan pulled Halla with them, even as she fought to get back to Stroud. Only once we were out of the Fade did she regain enough sense to close the rift and banish the demons._

Before he knew what he was doing, Cullen had thrown the reports to the other side of his tent. He didn’t want to read any more. He wished he hadn’t read them. Halla had offered her own life in exchange for her companions, in exchange for the Hawkes, in exchange for a Warden she barely knew. If they hadn’t reacted in time, if she had never come back…

Even after he fell asleep, trying to escape his doubts, his nightmares still plagued him, and he often woke in a cold sweat after watching a shadowy replica of Halla fall from the tower of Kinloch Hold or from atop the exploding Kirkwall Chantry.

Had he not been so wrapped up in his own thoughts, he would have noticed that Halla was avoiding him. She never shared his tent, never spoke to him, stayed as far from him as she could. She knew he would have read the reports; he would know that she had almost thrown herself away. The last time she had done that…shit, the last time she had done that was when they lost Haven. She’d seen the fear in his eyes as she and the other Inquisitors—they hadn’t even been Inquisitors then—left the Chantry to give up their lives for the Inquisition. She’d felt the tremble of relief in his arms when they had finally returned and he’d half-carried her back to the camp. She’d heard the plea and the promise in his voice when he said, “I will not allow the events at Haven to happen again.”

In the Fade, _she’d_ nearly allowed the events at Haven to happen again.

She’d stayed behind when the others went ahead to Skyhold. The soldiers hadn’t been there in the Fade, and they hadn’t read the reports. They wouldn’t have that damned look in their eyes, the one that was half pity and half reproach. When she traveled with the army, the only eyes she had to avoid were Cullen’s, and that was easy enough; the Commander always had some duty to attend to, and while they were on the move, there was rarely anything for the Inquisitor to do. She could spend as much time with her people as she wanted and never have to look Cullen in the eye.

It was selfish, Halla knew. Selfish to not want to hear Dorian’s quiet scolding as they waited for Solas to finish healing Aiyan, to not want to read how bluntly Panna stated Halla’s near-suicide, to not want to see her lover for fear of what accusing words he would hurl at her. But while she stayed with the army, she didn’t have to think about that. For the march back to Skyhold, she could nearly, nearly just be one of them.

But when they reached the fortress again, everything about her comfortable façade broke like a wave crashing on a rock.

\--

Halla woke the morning after reaching Skyhold to find the other side of her bed as smooth as it had been when she first fell on top of her blankets in the wee hours that morning. Her fist clenched on the covers. Cullen had slept in his own bed above his office instead. Part of her had wished for him to forgive her when they returned home.

_Selfish._

She pushed herself up, the thought of staying in bed suddenly abhorrent. What was the point if Cullen weren’t there to wake up slowly with her, to chuckle warmly as she tucked herself neatly to his side and pulled him close?

Halla glanced outside to check the time; it was nearly noon. Another guilty pang struck her heart; most of Skyhold had probably been awake for hours while she slept in. She dressed quickly, trying to make up for lost time, and started out, not really knowing where she was headed. _Not the war room, and not Cullen’s office._ Those were the two most likely places for Cullen to be at noon.

The training field, then. She needed to beat something up.

The ringing of steel on steel met her as usual, a comforting sound after the constant murmuring of the Fade still running through her mind. She slipped into the group waiting to be paired for sparring and stayed quiet, watching her soldiers converse, sharing bits of news and gossip.

“You and you, demonstrate the drill set!”

Halla’s head snapped up. Oh, no, this was bad, this was very bad, she was too close to the front—

Cullen stopped when he noticed the woman quickly hiding her face. “Inquisitor.” His tone had a formal, distant respect that she hadn’t heard from him since the first few weeks of the Inquisition.

It _hurt._

“Commander,” she replied, unable to get her voice above a murmur. She couldn’t meet his eyes.

“The rest of you, pair up and go over the set once those two have finished showing you! Carry on!” Cullen ordered.

Soldiers glanced back as they started toward the field proper. Neither the Inquisitor nor the Commander had moved, and the Inquisitor was still determinedly looking at the ground.

“You’ve been avoiding me, haven’t you?” Cullen made no attempt to keep his voice gentle.

“Yes,” Halla answered shortly.

“I think we both know why.”

“Yes,” she said again, stubbornly keeping her words clipped.

“What happened in the Fade—”

“You weren’t there.”

Cullen stopped mid-sentence, taken aback at the hostility in Halla’s tone. “Excuse me?”

“You weren’t there; you can’t criticize me—”

“Oh, yes, I bloody well can!” Cullen took a step toward her. “You _know_ how important you are. You were going to just throw yourself away! You’re the only one who can close rifts, our only hope for defeating Corypheus and closing the Breach! And yet you were going to commit _suicide_ to save—who? People who knew their duty, who knew that _you—_ ” he jabbed a finger at her, “absolutely had to come out of that alive! You showed an incredibly reckless disregard for your own life, for the Inquisition, for—for—” He couldn’t finish that. “What do you have to say for yourself, _Inquisitor?_ ”

Halla’s eyes were dark, nearly black in the shade. “I _had_ a plan.”

“It never would have _worked._ You would have been left in the Fade just as Stroud was,” Cullen said flatly.

“Exactly!” Halla burst out. “We left him! We left him in the fucking Fade, and I could have _saved_ him! If I had stayed, at least I would have a _chance_ at getting out instead of—dying there—shit!” She turned from him, drawing one of her daggers, reversing her grip on it, and hurling it at a training dummy all in one movement. The soldier attacking the dummy recoiled in shock as the knife landed in its head with a _thud._ “He’s dead!” Halla shouted. “Stroud’s _dead,_ and Aeducan’s _gone,_ and I could have _stopped it!_ ”

“No, you couldn’t have!” Cullen shouted back. “You are so _stubborn,_ why can’t you just _see?_ You would have died too, had you stayed behind!”

“No, I could have—”

“No, _you couldn’t have._ ” Cullen finally grabbed Halla’s shoulders, forcing her to look at him. “Would you just _listen,_ Halla? You are not immortal; you are not invulnerable! Stroud was _far_ more experienced than you are; if anyone had a chance there, it was him. And, unlike you, he knew that, above all, _you_ had to survive. He knew what it would do to our cause if you were left behind.”

“This isn’t about the _cause,_ ” Halla realized. “This isn’t about the Inquisition right now, is it, Cullen?”

“Of course it is!”

“This isn’t about Inquisitor Trevelyan.”

“Stop—”

“This is about _Halla._ ”

Cullen’s jaw tightened. “No.”

“Yes.” It was Halla’s turn to turn his face back to her. “This is about _me._ This is about _us._ This is about how much it frightens you to think that I could have been the one left behind. I’m not sorry for what I almost did, Cullen. But, for what it’s worth…I’m sorry for what I almost did to _you._ ”

“Halla.” Her name fell from a broken voice as Cullen pulled her to him and hugged her for the first time since the night before the siege.

Halla’s hands came up to grip the back of his coat. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’m sorry, Cullen.” And, quieter, “I love you.”

If they had been alone, she was sure he would have been shaking in her arms. But they were being surreptitiously watched by the training soldiers, so they let go of each other. “Spar with me?” Halla invited. “I need to hit something, and you need to get your point across.” She smiled, and it actually reached her eyes. “Let’s do that the way we know best, shall we?”

Cullen nodded, feeling his own mouth curve up too. “As you wish, Inquisitor.”

**Author's Note:**

> they ain't perfect, and when they fight, it's ugly.


End file.
